Abstract: The inverse design method for circular failure slope is a new kind of design approach for designing the slope angle of the circular failure slope based on its geotechnical parameters and height and the prescribed factor of safety. The key procedure for establishing the method is to integrate a large number of cases of stable circular failure slopes and to establish the mapping from {?, c, ?, H, F} to . This paper accumulated quite a few cases of circular failure slopes. ANN and ANFIS were used to integrate these cases and ANN-based and ANFIS-based approaches were established, respectively, for the inverse design of circular failure slope. Furthermore, the two approaches were used to design the slope angles of several cases and a comparison was conducted on the inverse design results. The research results have shown that ANFIS is more adequate to establish the ANFIS-based approach for the inverse design of circular failure slope.

Key words: artificial neural networks, adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system, circular failure slope, inverse design